Judith Lucy

I'M ADOPTED. My birth mother, Jan, came from a Catholic family so, when asked, her preference was that I, too, be raised in that faith. I recently had the conversation with her where I said, ''But didn't you see the awful irony that you were condemning me to the same religion that made you think you'd sinned by having sex outside of marriage?''

I'd like to report that this was a decision she had agonised over, but her reply was: ''I didn't really give it much thought.'' (Thankfully, also her approach to contraception.)

A couple of years ago I was having a very pleasant lunch with a friend and her mother, who happened to be a ''spiritual adviser''. She helped people fill their ''God-shaped hole''. Elizabeth was a lovely person (who has now gone to her God) and I found what she did genuinely fascinating, until she said, ''Oh, so you were brought up Catholic? You know, you all go back to it in the end.''

I wanted to scream, ''ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? I'M MORE LIKELY TO DIG UP AND FELLATE ONE OF THE THREE STOOGES!''

Mercifully, I refrained from offering my thoughtful rebuttal to this kind and gentle woman, but it was clear that she had hit a nerve.

For those of you who aren't Catholic, and especially if you were brought up without any kind of religion, try to imagine that from pretty much the moment you were born you were told a preposterous story as though it was completely true.

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Imagine you were told that there is a mystical roll of pressed chicken that can speak Mandarin. It can also travel through time and heal all sexually transmitted diseases.

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Not only did your parents tell you this, but you went to some building once a week with a whole bunch of other people who believed it, and you continued to worship the pressed chicken at school with the other kids for 12 years. It might have been over a decade before you encountered anyone who said, ''Hang on a minute, I reckon that's baloney''.

I HONESTLY believed for a long time that I had walked away from Catholicism relatively unscathed, yet a few years ago I became almost evangelical about a documentary called Deliver Us from Evil, a deeply disturbing look at the abuse that has occurred within the church. I wanted every Catholic, practising or lapsed, to see it.

As well as the horror of the physical abuse, it captures the devastation families feel at having their faith taken from them. The glue that held their lives together was stripped by the priests who betrayed them. It's not like having a family doctor exploit your trust - for these people, the man who betrayed them REPRESENTED GOD.

But why did I care so much? I had some pretty mixed feelings about the church, so I was curious and a little anxious to see what taking a walk down my religious memory lane would do to me when we filmed material for the first episode of [the ABC series] Judith Lucy's Spiritual Journey.

Something I was not expecting to be touched by was spending time with some Catholic nuns. One of the things my mother always loved to say, when she wasn't talking about joining the IRA, was that nuns have a great life. She'd see my primary school headmistress, Sister Florence, zipping around in a new car or off to a retreat in Europe, and jealously quip that she'd love that life (a lot of my mother's fantasies seemed to rely on not having children, which was difficult not to take just a little personally).

I think she kind of forgot about the poverty vow and helping others. As far as Ann Lucy was concerned, these nuns were virtually Hugh Hefner, living the high life. I knew mum's idea was completely off the mark, but I had no real clue what being a nun was like, and since it was the only ''career'' I'd ever really entertained, apart from being a performer, this seemed like a great opportunity to find out.

I don't know how seriously I thought about being a nun as a child. It's easy to think that marrying God is a great idea when you're 12. I didn't know, at that age, that life might hold many temptations that I would at least like to try. At that point, my idea of a good time was a Warner Bros cartoon and a mug of Milo. In truth, I let go of the idea pretty quickly, essentially because my big brother was scathing about it, but I would've jettisoned it anyway, once I'd realised that it was incompatible with a life on the stage and all of that blow I planned on taking with Robert Downey jnr.

Now, here I was at 42, single, childless, not much of a family - OH MY GOD, HAD I MADE THE WRONG CHOICE? When I requested of our show's researcher, Robyn, that it would be great if we could find a nun my age so we could compare our lives, I wasn't really holding my breath. Even when I was at school, the younger nuns all seemed like the walking dead (they were probably in their 30s). But, true to form, Robyn found Sister Rebecca McCabe, a Mercy sister only a year older than me, living in Sydney.

Rebecca is a physiotherapist in a health centre and a senior clinical researcher at Greenwich Hospital in Sydney. We met her at the clinic where she does physio and I liked her immediately. I don't know what I was expecting, but I wanted to say, ''But you're just so normal''. Maybe I thought she would be overly pious or lack a sense of humour, because of my dealings with nuns as a kid.

The next day I went to Rebecca's home. She lives in a villa, one of three each occupied by a nun, although Margaret and Pauline are considerably older. At first I was actually a little shocked. Where were the habits? Was Rebecca really wearing a denim jacket? Why don't they just put on some bikinis and high heels? As soon as I saw the lovely modern homes with their large-screen televisions, I thought of mum. As I sat down with the women to enjoy lovely pasta and a glass of wine, I could just hear her saying, ''See I told you - they live great lives. What I wouldn't have done for that freedom.''

They do have independence to an extent now, but that's a relatively recent development, and it was saddening to hear the older nuns talk of a time when becoming a sister meant virtually leaving your family for good. They spoke of visiting the sick in hospital but of not being allowed to visit their own dying parents, and crying themselves to sleep at night.

These remarkable women dedicated themselves to God at very young ages. I know they were growing up in a different time, but still, the idea of knowing that you wanted to be a nun at 13, as Pauline claims, seems incomprehensible to me. All I knew at that age was that I wanted to get my hands on the Loverboy single Turn Me Loose.

I was struck by how intelligent and warm these ladies are. How they love to engage in thoughtful conversation and have no problem being critical of the Catholic Church. They talked of its sexism and hypocrisy, and yet this is clearly all secondary to their love of God and their passion for social justice … oh, and sport. They don't have big tellies for nothing.

Rebecca has never worn a habit or lived in a convent, and admits that it might've been a different story if she'd had to. She became a nun at 25 because she ''wanted to do something radical''. My idea of radical was getting an asymmetrical bob. She'd been a champion swimmer as a child, ninth in the world at one point, but when training for the 1984 Olympics she sustained a shoulder injury that was the beginning of the end of her career. She'd stopped attending Mass at 15, but, as often seems to be the case, a major shift in her life made her question what the point of it all was.

This was the first of many times on the shoot that I was impressed by someone asking the ''big'' life questions at a very young age. While Rebecca was exploring the meaning of life, I'd just walked away from the church, but it would be years before I questioned that decision or consciously experienced any kind of a feeling of loss about it. Maybe I was only doing that now.

The biggest challenge for Rebecca has been turning her back on the idea of family and a partner. She talked freely about being in love since becoming a nun. I believe she thinks that it's unrealistic to imagine that one person can fulfil all your needs for life. That's something I agree with. These women all strike me as feminists.

I joined the ladies for a liturgy in their prayer room. Rebecca at one point referred to Catholicism being in her DNA and that's something I more than understand. I was uncomfortable praying - I couldn't even bring myself to make the sign of the cross, because I thought that it would be hypocritical - yet it was all so familiar. It wasn't only out of respect for those wonderful women that I didn't just want to go through the motions, either. I have to admit that it was out of some sort of respect for the religion to which I devoted the first 18 years of my life.

They completely disarmed me when they offered up a prayer for me, and then for the whole team and the success of the series. I asked them to get me a husband, too - well, whatever works.

I've seen Rebecca a couple of times since our introduction and I like to think that the friendship will continue. I don't know that she has finished her journey yet, and she clearly has her reservations about the church.

I'm not about to take my vows, but I was honestly struck more by the similarities between Rebecca and me than the differences. Clearly, we both have some sort of yearning for ''a purpose'' or meaning in our lives, and maybe, to some extent, we're both questioning how we have arrived at this point of our lives without partners or a family.

I know many single women around my age dealing with these issues, and maybe what we are ''missing'' is the thing that Rebecca has that takes her out of her own head, by thinking of others and some sort of bigger picture. I doubt she's ever looked in the mirror and thought, ''Maybe God would find me more attractive if I had some Botox''. (Although possibly it's the frozen faces of those statues of Mary that have inspired people like Sandra Bullock.)

Meeting those women and talking about the religion of my youth made me almost miss it. Maybe I don't believe in the god I grew up with, but it strikes me that someone like Rebecca doesn't really, either. For a split second, I wondered if it was possible to just take the bits of Catholicism that I like and work with those. Apparently, the Dalai Lama said people from the West should look for answers in the traditions they know, and maybe there's something to that.

AS I entered the church to talk to Father Gerry Gleeson, I was more nervous [about] this interview than any other. I knew Gerry and I would disagree on many areas and yet I didn't want to be disrespectful, because I'm hardwired to treat priests well. Gerry is a reasonable, clever man. He studied at Cambridge and lectures in philosophy and ethics. I liked him, but it didn't take long for my anger about the doctrine of the church to be stirred up. Issues like contraception and abortion are always going to rile me.

Talking to Gerry reminded me of the problems I will always have with [the church], such as its misogyny and homophobia. He even spoke of the possibility of being reunited with our bodies after death, which made me want to give John Travolta a call to say that maybe the whole Scientology thing wasn't so ludicrous after all.

Gerry certainly took me back to the negative feelings I'd had about the church at 18, but I've let a lot of my anger go. I'm not a fan of the institution, but there are a lot of great practising Catholics out there, and while I might question their choice, I no longer dismiss it. (Although, with no offence to my spiritual adviser friend, I think I'm still more likely to give Curly head than return to Catholicism.)

■This is an edited extract from Drink, Smoke, Pass Out by Judith Lucy, published by Viking, rrp $29.99. Also available as an e-book.